The inaugural Biennale of Australian Art (BOAA) opens this weekend in Ballarat, and it’s a chance for the people of the city – and visitors – to see some of Australia’s finest artists, sculptors and musicians.
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Years in the planning, BOAA brings 150 artists into Ballarat, with 65 solo shows and well over 1000 artworks and sculptures scattered across the historic city.
BOAA director Julie Collins says she hopes the biennale will re-dedicate Ballarat’s position as a city which prides itself on support for the arts.
“Ballarat already has a strong arts and cultural network, and always has, but perhaps we haven’t sold ourselves as well as we could.”
She says Ballarat is an ideal venue for the six-week art, sculpture, photography, fashion and music exhibition.
“When I first moved here 10 years ago, I thought the physicality of Ballarat was perfect to hold an indoor and outdoor festival because of its heritage buildings and lakes and gardens,” Collins said.
“To do this in Melbourne, it would get lost. In a city like Ballarat, you can get that whole-of-town experience.”
Ten things to see and do at The Biennale of Australian Art
Visitors searching for Ryan Kennedy’s Biennale of Australian Art installation in the George Farmer Building will find themselves going to a dark place.
The space he is working in is a large-scale, dark, sub-basement of the historic site and, when Mr Kennedy visited it more than a year ago he felt right at home.
Liz Sonntag’s trade in art is different to all others, with tiny toys reimagined into quirky scenes that are randomly placed in the great outdoors.
Her canvas is the random nooks and crannies along streets and laneways that most people walk past.
A giant golden pyramid made of 24 carat gold thread representing the volume of gold exported from Victoria during the goldrush will gradually appear in the Eureka Centre over the coming weeks.
The giant work, measuring about five metres in diameter and five metres high, will be made from 3000m of gold thread and the minds of internationally-renowned artists Ken and Julia Yonetani.
They might not be practical, but the outfits on parade for the Biennale of Australian Art’s The Living Sculpture/Art of Fashion Parade are guaranteed to be eye-catching.
BOAA artwear director Christine Crawshaw predicts some of the fashion on show will only allow models to “walk and breathe” but is expecting the visual beauty to trump the need for practicality.
AC/DC’s trip down the main drag of Melbourne and into history is one of the inspirations behind the Biennale of Australian Art’s decision to build a mobile stage for the music program of the forthcoming arts festival, says Ballarat music historian and archivist Rex Hardware.
Hardware says the program will activate venues rarely used in the city for artistic purposes by instead parking and playing gigs across midweek and weekends around Lake Wendouree and the historic open space at St Andrew’s Church on Sturt Street.
Louiseann King’s new exhibition at the AGB, solis, is a deliberate challenge to the accepted gaze. She’s immersed her own work among the prized colonial oils, and reorganised them to construct a new narrative about the stories they tell, and about the gallery itself.
King has taken the actual gallery building itself, with its statuesque dimensions and Victorian colours and timbres, and used it as an integral component of her work.
Aside from the exhibitions it houses inside, the building itself is worth a visit just to see the 10,000 square metres of industrial history reused.
The massive George Farmer & Co. building on the corner of Eureka and Joseph streets has stood empty since the 1970s. It was the site of one of Ballarat’s most successful businesses, founded around the time of the goldrush and continuing until the late 1970s.
Three Top End artists have braved the cooler climes of Ballarat’s weather to bring a multi-platform improvisational work to the Biennale of Australian Art.
Koulla Roussos, Tarzan JungleQueen and Matthew van Roden are presenting their multimedia work The Contiguity of Totalisation as a video installation on St Andrew’s Kirk and as a photographic exhibition in Unicorn Lane.
Lake Wendouree has been transformed into a giant open-air gallery for the Biennale of Australian Art.
Thirty-six outdoor sculptures are installed around the lake for the BOAA Lakeside Sculpture Walk, representing works from four well known or emerging sculptors from each state and territory of Australia.
Constructed in the 1860s, the former Presbyterian bluestone church has been sitting vacant since 2013.
St Andrew's hosts The Great Australian Landscape, which features one artist from every state and territory. Each has created their own interpretation of the Australian landscape across an 8m-long scale.
Among them is Josh Muir, a multi-media artist who grew up in Ballarat. His street art style of practice results in brightly-coloured works that combine pop culture with his proud Aboriginal heritage. He sees his work as a contemporary way of telling traditional stories.
